I've got a Samba server on Fedora Core 3 which is fine to browse to and works ok, so I decided to try a debian server as well, I set up a very simple Debian stable system and samba, and the storage share is working fine, but I can't browse to it? I can open the share by ip address, so it seems to be a Netbios problem. I don't understand because I've been going over and over the smb.conf and comparing the two. The only difference is that Debian is using domain authentication and I used SWAT on it instead of hand editing like I did on Fedora. The smb.conf is shown below:

Also, on Fedora, I've noticed, I can't ping any windows systems by hostname either, although they can ping me by hostname. Both systems have nmbd and smbd running. Both these machines have their hostnames set as well as other general networking settings(ip,gw,netmask,broadcast etc). I must have missed something. Anyone help?

I notice you haven't got it set to be the DOMAIN MASTER. Presumably you have another (Windows ?) machine that performs this function. Does that machine know about your Debian box ? Try putting it's name and IP address into the hosts file on the Domain Master (don't know if this will work, but it shouldn't cause any harm & is worth a try...)

You could try joining the domain. that would register your computer in the Domain whether it is running a server or not. I used " net ads join -w myworkgroupordomain" and that did the trick in Mandriva2005LE, havent tried in Kubuntu. Did not get this working in Redhat 9. - Good Luck

First try adding "netbios name = SambaServer" into the global section of smb.conf where SambaServer is the hostname of the server. Also on the client's side when you can ping by IP address but not by name - try adding the hostname to the /etc/hosts file and see if that cures it, and see what /etc/resolv.conf says about DNS.